“How is this?” Luther wrote about this time to Justus Jonas, who, at Halle, had gone through much the same experience, “We pray against the Turk, we are the teachers of the people and their intercessors with God and yet those who wish to be accounted ‘Evangelicals’ rashly excite the wrath of God by their avarice, their robbing and plundering of the Church. The people let us go on teaching, praying and suffering while they heap sin upon sin!”[710] _Excerpts from Luther’s Letters to the New “Bishop”_ Luther’s correspondence with his friend Amsdorf affords an instructive psychological insight into the working of his mind. During those last years of his life he took refuge more and more in a certain fanatical mysticism. He sought comfort in the thought of his exalted calling and in a kind of inspiration; yet all he could do availed but little against his inward gloom. Amsdorf, the whilom Catholic priest, found little pleasure in his episcopal status and felt bitterly both his isolation and the contrast between a pomp that was irksome to him and the real emptiness of his position; Luther, accordingly, in the letters of consolation he wrote him, appealed to the Divine inspiration, which had led to his appointment as bishop. The consecration was surely undertaken at the express command of God which no man may oppose. “In these Divine matters,” he writes, “it is far safer to allow oneself to be carried away than to take any active part; this is what happened in your case, and yours is a noble and unusual example. We are never in worse case than when we fancy we are acting with discernment and understanding, because then self-complacency slinks in; but the blinder we are, the more God acts through us. He does more than we can think or understand.” We have here the same principle to which he had been so fond of appealing in the early days of his career so as to be able to attribute to God the unforeseen and far-going consequences of his deeds, and to reassure himself and urge himself on. “We must never seek to know,” he said to Amsdorf, “what God wills to accomplish through us.” “The most foolish thing is the wisest.”[711] “God rules the world by means of fools and children, He will finish His work [in you] by our means, just as in the Book of Proverbs (xxx. 2), where we are called the greatest fools on earth.”[712] “It is the counsel of a fool,” so Luther said in his “Exempel” of his intentions regarding the bishops’ sees, “and I am a fool. But because it is God’s counsel, therefore it is at least the counsel of a wise fool.”[713]